THE NOVEL AGAIN
187
superb short novel,
Seize the Day,
may in the present context be taken
as an exception which proves the miserable rule.
III
That this development is not altogether new but has its roots in
the tradition of the novel should be sufficiently clear. Nevertheless,
this kind of fiction has never before occupied so prominent a part of
the field nor claimed so large a proportion of the better writers.
The novelists whom I have mentioned are writers of vitality and
intelligence, and I do not want to disparage their achievement or
discredit anyone's admiration of it. And yet it must be recognized,
I think, that they are writing in what can only be judged as a minor
mode. The very qualities of
exquisit~ness,
restraint, and propriety of
form which distinguish their writing from that of other and lesser
figures also serve to set them off from what has been the major
tradition of the novel.
If
the type of fiction I have been describing
were currently competing with other types, either traditional or
equally innovating, which gave evidence of similar vitality, then the
situation would
be
quite different.
But what is apparent is that a break in the tradition of the
novel seems to be taking place. Opinions will of course differ over
the date at which the break begins and over the reasons for its
continuance, but at this late hour few will question the fact that
an interruption has occurred. It may even have persisted long enough
to have affected the novel's audience and to have brought about a
change in what can be thought of as the sociology of novel-reading–
at least in America, which does not have the English advantage of
a firm tradition of intelligent but second-rate fiction.
In this connection, I should like to speak from personal experi–
ence, for I first became aware of what seemed to me a change in
the ranks of novel-readers in the course of my duties as a teacher. In
my classes during the last few years I have noticed that when I
chose to illustrate a point by comparing or contrasting it to some–
thing in a modern novel, I met a curious response. It is nearer the
truth to say that I met no response, and that my students of recent
years, unlike their predecessors, have been unfamiliar with the gen–
eral range and canon of the modern novel. Since I like to think of
myself as a conscientious teacher- which means, I suppose, that I
